3Blue1Brown: Essence of Calculus: study plan and how long it takes
The 3Blue1Brown playlist is 12 videos and 3.2 hours long. Here's how long it takes at different paces, a week-by-week schedule built from the real videos, and a planner that turns it into your own daily plan.
12 videos · 3.2 hours · 3Blue1Brown
Grant Sanderson's Essence of Calculus builds visual intuition for the subject: what derivatives really are, derivative formulas through geometry, the chain and product rules, Euler's number, implicit differentiation, limits and L'Hôpital's rule, integration and the fundamental theorem, higher-order derivatives and Taylor series.
Twelve videos and about three hours, designed to make calculus feel like something you could have invented.
Who it's for: Students starting calculus, and anyone who learned the rules but never understood why they work.
How long does it take?
The full playlist is 3.2 hours across 12 videos. Here's roughly how many days that is at different daily watch times and speeds, counting video time only:
| Daily time | At 1x | At 1.5x | At 2x |
|---|---|---|---|
| 30 min a day | 7 days | 5 days | 4 days |
| 1 h a day | 4 days | 3 days | 2 days |
| 2 h a day | 2 days | 2 days | 1 days |
Make your own schedule
The playlist link is already filled in. Press Plan, set how much time you have each day and your speed, and you'll get a day-by-day schedule with a finish date and a calendar file. It reads the live playlist, so new videos are included.
Week-by-week schedule
A sample plan at 30 minutes a day and normal speed, using whole videos so none is split across days. That's 2 weeks in total. For a different pace, start date or speed, use the planner above.
Week 1Videos 1–8 · 2h 16m
Day 1 · 17m
- 1The essence of calculus17m
Day 2 · 17m
- 2The paradox of the derivative | Chapter 2, Essence of calculus17m
Day 3 · 18m
- 3Derivative formulas through geometry | Chapter 3, Essence of calculus18m
Day 4 · 30m
- 4Visualizing the chain rule and product rule | Chapter 4, Essence of calculus16m
- 5What's so special about Euler's number e? | Chapter 5, Essence of calculus14m
Day 5 · 16m
- 6Implicit differentiation, what's going on here? | Chapter 6, Essence of calculus16m
Day 6 · 18m
- 7Limits, L'Hôpital's rule, and epsilon delta definitions | Chapter 7, Essence of calculus18m
Day 7 · 21m
- 8Integration and the fundamental theorem of calculus | Chapter 8, Essence of calculus21m
Week 2Videos 9–12 · 55m
Day 8 · 18m
- 9What does area have to do with slope? | Chapter 9, Essence of calculus13m
- 10Higher order derivatives | Chapter 10, Essence of calculus6m
Day 9 · 22m
- 11Taylor series | Chapter 11, Essence of calculus22m
Day 10 · 14m
- 12The other way to visualize derivatives | Chapter 12, Essence of calculus14m
Tips for finishing
- Watch one or two chapters a day and pause when Grant asks you to think before he explains.
- Pair it with practice problems from a textbook or Khan Academy; the series builds intuition, not calculation speed.